Greetings from
Athambia

     Greetings, I am imperturbable, uninterested, athambic. Not qualities of life. Qualities of a drain plug. The drain plug, a function of divinity. Divinity, homologized with: 

 

     Music. Myth. The song. The tradition. The avant-garde. The tradition of the avant-garde. The tradition, the ritual. The ritual—interrupted. 

 

     divinity with a lowercase ‘d’. Various apotheoses of music can be found in the rigidity of the ‘classical’ music world, the exaltation of music and drugs, the cultural outlet of a music scene, or the iconization of personae. The human propensity to make divinity is a wonderful thing. It invokes a passion, an extremity of emotion and behaviour of preeminent esteem in the human experience. It can be applied anywhere, given the proper frame and presentation. 

 

     In Greetings from Athambia, we are looking at divinity. The listener is the silent observer, like the journalist through their focus lens, of a titanomachy. A dialogism of two distinct forms, traditional and experimental. (Who’s to say which is which?) The songs, with strong folk underpinning, are a form of myth-making, story-telling with a tonal centre. These are intercut with experimental layerings that use the recordings as source material. Through a structural architecture built in Max/MSP, spectral freezes of songs come in and out, taking these audial fingerprints and dislodging them from their mythical housings. Strata of sounds are extracted from songs at random, transmuted spectrally in range and domain. The published result is only one runthrough of the program; another iteration would yield different sectional cuts and different sounds therein.

 

     Athambia also engages with the affixation of nature against the flux of the artifice (of artificial origin). The artifice, being a temporary state, one that ends once it is discarded as such, holds a high mutability. That is what allows it to not only survive, but to thrive, and submit nature to its tyranny. Its paradox, and its fulfillment, occurs with the ‘us & them’ dynamic (here nature & artifice), one that is ubiquitously recognized as natural. But the artifice is a concept that retains utility in the scope of our relationship with change. It becomes a tool to vilify what we want gone, or conversely, to apotheosize human developments. 

 

     Both vilifying and apotheosizing, as functions of artifice, have riddled and rained upon the two contrarian subjects present in Athambia. Yet, the listener does not have to stake an interest in either of them. It is a spectacle of discourse between obsolescent forms of artifice. 50+ years prior, the experimental component would have been avant-gardist. An apotheosizing term. Today, one may find the pendulum swings the other way. The same can be said of the ‘bedroom album’ quality of the songs, that would be a praiseful artifice 15–20 years prior. 

 

     Placing an observer to this sum, this product, aims to question who/what manufactures what we hold as divine. Increasingly, divinity is an imposed superlative, produced for profit. But on this exponential trajectory, the invoked passion from the artifice of the divine becomes overbearing. 

 

     So athambia sets in.